She explained how the regulations were changing and the steps we were taking to meet the new rules. The UK implementation of the new regime is led by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) and more information can be found on the ICO website.

The principle behind the changes is that users of websites should be given more information about the cookies set on their computers or other devices by those websites, and the means to set their own preferences.

At the same time, both regulators and publishers are keen to find a way to do this that is not intrusive and does not unduly disrupt a user’s normal experience of a site. We have made a number of changes to the BBC website to ensure that we give users more control over the types of cookies they accept.

We have built a new feature which allows you to turn off any of the three classes of cookies on the BBC’s website, which are not in the category of "Strictly Necessary Cookies", as explained in the section on different types of cookies below, if you wish to do so. This functionality will be on the international website bbc.com soon. is also available on the international website, bbc.com. 

The new feature enables users to turn off cookies that are not strictly necessary

The pages also explain how users can manage the cookies set by the Adobe Flash Player.

From today users of BBC Online will be presented with a banner telling them about the use of cookies and how they can change their settings at any time, on first use of their chosen browser (e.g. Internet Explorer, FireFox etc).

At the present time it is not technically possible for us to allow you to carry your settings with you between your browsers and devices so you will need to change these settings from each browser you use.

Users will be offered three options:

• to find out more about cookies
• to change their settings
• or to continue their journey, either by clicking on Continue or by clicking elsewhere on the page

Users who subsequently decide to change their settings can do so at any time by clicking on the link to Cookies in the footer of every page.

The  ICO’s guidance defines four different types of cookie:

Strictly Necessary Cookies, few in number, are those which are essential to enable you to move around the website and use its essential features. Without them a user’s normal expectations cannot be met. One example is the cookie that allows you to automatically sign in to the BBC website for a service which you have previously registered for.

The second category is Functionality Cookies. These cookies allow the website to remember a user’s preferences in terms of look and feel, language or location. One example is to enable you to set your preferred location to receive your local news and weather forecast.

Performance Cookies collect information, usually anonymised, about the areas of the site visited by a user, frequency of visits and any errors experienced, inter alia. This information helps publishers to improve their services by helping them to understand user behaviour and experience in the mass.

Finally, Advertising Cookies gather information which helps to ensure that the advertisements served to a user are relevant. In the BBC’s case these only apply to users who access our services from outside the UK via the BBC’s international site, bbc.com, which is advertising funded. This data is also anonymised. There is more on this on our cookies pages.

Ian Hunter is Managing Editor, BBC Online

Other useful links:

• allaboutcookies.org
• aboutcookies.org
• "cookie" at Wikipedia

Correction (cookie management on bbc.com) 11:38 Fri 25 May

And many have claimed this is only the latest failure, after the wiping (or worse) of programmes in the sixties which are seen as classics today. This is not, and never was, part of the plan.

My post last month explained that we were exploring a range of options for managing legacy content. "Deleting the lot" was not one of them, though offline storage is. The debate is quite complex. For example, one of our oldest sites www.bbc.co.uk/otr is still accessible but you could argue that it is a travesty of what its makers intended. Over time various features (for example, search) have ceased to function. You could argue that the BBC should spend money bringing this site up to date every time technology moves on, but would that be money well spent? The site still offers a number of transcripts of political interviews of the time and we may make it part of the news product. But there still may come a time when people interested in the site are better served by careful offline storage. We are also looking to apply this approach to www.bbc.co.uk/politics97.
Many have argued that www.bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar should remain accessible to a wide audience. Again, this is an example of a site we are looking to consolidate into a bigger product - in this case the history section of knowledge and learning.

Similarly, assets from many of the 170 sites will be re-presented in forms which can be more easily kept up to date. For instance, www.bbc.co.uk/hamlet has been superseded by https://bbcstreaming.pages.dev/programmes/b00pk71s and placed into a format which will allow the data and assets to be refreshed or editorially changed going forward. The same has been done with www.bbc.co.uk/annefrank.

This is similar to what a site like the Guardian does when it updates its look and feel. A story from 1999 is still viewable but much of its context has gone, at least in the form which is most accessible, online http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/1999/dec/03/guardianobituaries?INTCMP=SRCH

This means that if we wish to preserve a full record of what we have published, context as well as content, we need to explore a range of options including offline storage.

To restate our intentions: we are moving towards a rational content lifecycle for our websites as practiced by many other sites across the web. The aim is consistent high quality everywhere on the site. We have a number of stand-alone websites which will in due course become obsolete and need to be managed. Some will be consolidated into bigger, persistently managed, content offerings. Others will be moved offline to be preserved.

As our plan develops we'll keep you informed.

Ian Hunter is Managing Editor, BBC Online

Editor's note: Some people seem to be experiencing difficulties commenting on this post. This is a technical problem or bug which is being investigated. Apologies and please bear with us. Update 1 p.m. - this bug has now been fixed and comments are now open again. Apologies.

A challenge we set ourselves was to reduce the number from over 400 to under 200. This is a progress report.

The challenge had two parts. First, it made us ask which parts of the site really delivered in terms of audience benefit and therefore should be kept and built on. They formed part of our "fewer things, better" approach.

It is also true that some sites, for example, /news naturally absorbed older content into its online archive, allowing people to follow stories back in time. Our /programmes site also works in this way, designed to provide a long term record of BBC broadcast output. However, where a site was more stand alone and its content no longer attracted users, was becoming unreliable, or video and audio assets unplayable, it was easy enough to earmark it for closure.

Second, we had to decide how best to manage the legacy content. Even sites which had become out of date were likely to have some historical interest. We looked into possible online archiving solutions but none fitted the bill. So we have decided to store the core content from our older websites offline, allowing interested parties in future to be able to recreate at least some of the experience they offered.

A number of sites which previously had their own TLDs will become absorbed into BBC Online's new products. Their assets, therefore, will continue to be available.

For others, a typical lifecycle is emerging.

This goes from live to a "mothball" state, where the content still has value but is no longer updated, for example /palin.

At some stage mothballed content becomes stale or potentially damaging and it needs to be taken offline. At that stage a "tombstone" tells users what has happened and may offer alternatives.This also avoids breaking the user's journey. The material taken offline is stored for future reference, or deleted altogether.

For the record, here is our current list of TLDs which are earmarked for closure before the end of the year.

Ian Hunter is Managing Editor, BBC Online

Central to the new strategy is a tighter focus on the BBC's editorial priorities to make the service better, and a 25% reduction in BBC Online's budget. Both will affect our approach to social media.

We believe there are three fundamental ways social media can enhance BBC Online.

First, to enrich our content. Drawing on the collective knowledge and experience of our users can improve what we publish, for everyone. One recent example of this was A History of the World. Another is comments on blogs which often illuminate or extend or challenge a post in interesting ways.

Second, to bring more people to our content. When a user recommends something to his or her network of friends that is more likely to interest them than when the BBC makes the recommendation. More eyes on the same content means better value for money.

Third, to better engage audiences. Engaged users come back more frequently, increasing the value of the service to them. Richer connections with the user can help us be more open, transparent and accountable.

The next phase of our approach to social will be to move from a site which offers a few fairly circumscribed social experiences to one which is more social everywhere.

We recognise that contributions made off BBC Online can also add value to the content we publish, so we want to converge onsite and offsite contributions better than we do now. You can see the beginnings of this via Buzz and in our coverage of live events like the recent Ashes cricket or the Archers 60th anniversary.

Similarly, we are looking at the potential for broadening the interactions around some of our blogs by exposing a wider range of relevant social contributions.

The most notable changes are probably the closure of 606 and proposed disposal of H2G2. These sites are certainly social and in their own terms, successful. However, neither have strong links to the BBC's content. Ben Gallop on the Sports Editors blog explains more about the closure of 606, and its fit with the broader changes in Sport. H2G2 is a unique community but it does not sit comfortably alongside anything else we do. The site has been created, and is sustained by, its users and our hope is to find a new owner who will nurture it in the coming years. In due course we plan to close the BBC iPlayer message board whose function is increasingly being taken on by new features within the product and BBC Online.

This isn't a sudden change in direction. Sites that have only a peripheral connection with our editorial purposes, don't significantly enhance our content or only engage small audiences can't any longer justify the resources they need. This is why we have closed a number of message boards in the past year or so. This process will continue, selectively.

How, then, can we make the whole of BBC Online more social?

In recent months we have experimented with enabling comments within some news pages. We will be looking to extend this in the coming months, developing the editors' picks feature and the ability to rate other people's comments.

BBC iPlayer users are able to recommend programmes (and add a comment) and have these posted to their accounts in Facebook or Twitter. Again, this is a small start to something we plan to extend more widely. Some programmes and networks will continue to experiment with, and improve, the official BBC pages we manage on Facebook (such as BBC Radio 1 and Eastenders) and Youtube. And we'll continue to explore collaborations like Sound of 2011 with social sites like Songkick and LastFM.

Much of this is standard practice across the web, of course, and we need to evolve to meet the changing expectations of our users. The size of BBC Online, the legacy systems on which it was built, our commitment to maintaining the highest editorial standards and to providing a safe social environment mean that the task is complex. And in a world where we have fewer people and less money we have to focus on doing the things which promise to offer the biggest benefits to all of our users.

Ian Hunter is Managing Editor, BBC Online

Read Erik Huggers' post: "Reshaping BBC Online"

Read Ben Gallop's post: "Changes to Sport Online".

We make iPlayer content available in a variety of media formats (WMV, H.264, 3GP, MPEG, etc) many of which are open source, or at least not tied to a particular company's products.

In order to respect the rights agreements that allow us to make the content available in the first place, we use a range of content protection techniques and technologies:

- for downloads, we use digital rights management systems (Windows Media, Adobe, and OMA)

- for streaming, we use systems like SSL, RTMP, RTSP, HTTP

Many of these content delivery methods are open-source.

We also implement a range of technologies that attempt to check that our content is being played out in iPlayer, and not in an unauthorised 3rd-party application. This is because we need to be as certain as we can be that our content rights restrictions are being respected.

This is the key to the concerns being expressed at the moment: before we allow a device to access our content we need to check that it is iPlayer and not an application which might break our rules - for example, by storing programmes beyond the 30 day limit, or playing them outside the UK.

We know that a number of applications have been making unauthorised use of some media types and we have tightened security accordingly - this was done for several of the formats and content delivery types, not just for Flash. The result was that some applications that 'deep link' to our content may no longer work.

It's important to note that this has nothing to do with Flash, and it's nothing to do with support for open-source. In fact we continue to make our content available as H.264 or SSL, both of them open standards that have nothing to do with Flash or with Adobe. It's simply that the first people to be affected by this change happened to be linking to our Flash streams, which now have similar protection levels to our open-source streams.

The discussion around this issue suggests that two different uses of the term "open source" are being conflated:

a) we continue to make our content available in a range of open-source formats

b) unfortunately one of the applications that stopped working was XBMC, an open-source media player.

But the two "open sources" are quite different to each other - we have no particular attachment to Flash over open-source formats. In fact most of iPlayer is built on open-source products. However, we do need to protect our content from applications that threaten to make unauthorised use of it, even if those applications are themselves open source.

To answer Mo's comment, of course the BBC does not want people to download content illegally. That's precisely why we have built rights related constraints into BBC iPlayer. If an application becomes broken, people will be able to find alternatives which are legal and that we support. BBC iPlayer is already available on many, many devices and platforms which are legal and supported and in the coming year we will be adding as many new ones as we can.

Ian Hunter is Managing Editor, BBC Online

On Monday November 2nd we'll be switching all of the BBC's blogs to BBC iD from the previous BBC membership system. And in the New Year our message boards and other communities will be heading down the same route.

Those of you posting comments to the Strictly Social website over the weekend may have been asked to upgrade your BBC membership to the new BBC iD system. And anyone who has contributed to the BBC iPlayer message boards in recent weeks will already have created a BBC iD. They'll also be aware of some of the teething problems we've had. These should by now have been ironed out.

By March 2010 BBC iD will be the single sign in for all BBC Online services. If you have an existing BBC membership account for blogs, message boards or other services at some point in the next few months you will be automatically prompted to upgrade to BBC iD.

We do need to replace the old system, but we don't underestimate the inconvenience the transition will represent for some of our users. We apologise for this and hope that you will find the service improvements that BBC iD will support over the coming months for example, working on mobiles - make it all worthwhile.

We've tried to answer the questions you may have about the new system here.

If we've missed anything, please let us know. Most users should be able to upgrade their account from a BBC membership to a BBC iD when prompted with a minimum of fuss.

We'll be keeping you up to date with the roll-out of BBC iD via the BBC Internet blog.

NB: There's one thing you will need to think about if you have more than one BBC membership account:
If you have more than one BBC membership you'll only be able to upgrade one of those accounts to BBC iD using your preferred username and email address. That BBC iD account will retain links to your previous membership account and any comments and posts you made using it. So if you have more than one BBC membership, make sure you upgrade your favourite one.

Ian Hunter is Managing Editor, Internet Group, BBC Future Media and Technology.

By then the BBC iPlayer was well on its way from being the BBC's blue eyed boy to something more like a spectre at the feast. Every month it seemed a rival broadcaster launched its own video on demand service. One commentator remarked in July 2007 that the "the BBC has gone from market leader to market laggard". We worried that we would be too late.

Of course, we understood that we - the BBC and its partners at Siemens and Red Bee Media - were embarked on the heroic transformation of linear broadcasting... but who would care about that if the thing didn't work?

There were dark mutterings - some from BBC staff - about iPlayer's peer to peer download system and how it might mangle software and bankrupt the unwary. Had we chosen the wrong system?

We also worried that it would work too well. Our initial projections suggested that if 40,000 people downloaded programmes at the same time the internet would grind to a halt. How could we monitor this - and what could we do? Now that daily streams easily top a million we've relaxed a bit.

We owe a huge debt of gratitude to the hundreds, then thousands, who signed up to iPlayer during its long months behind a walled garden. The early trialists were encouraging and, above all, patient. For three weeks in February 2007 we suspended the service entirely. Many of them were actively helpful - our operations team would eagerly scan the message board to see if anyone had a solution for that day's problem.

By June 2007, 15000 had signed up though fewer stayed the course. A drawback of our first design was that it drew as much attention to the (all too many) programmes we didn't have as to those we did. Another was beginning with downloads rather than streaming. This brought more technical problems - with browsers, firewalls and the rest - and made it trickier to explain how to make iPlayer work.

By the Autumn, things were looking up and we began to grapple with more traditional editorial concerns. If there was no watershed on the web how could we warn users about grown up content? (Our parental lock system, built in record time.) Could we find a way to quickly edit programme descriptions that had errors? (Yes, but it took a long time to enable that.) Would millions of people call our helpdesk team and bankrupt the BBC? (Not so far.)

And then we were free! Anthony Rose and the team sorted out streaming and much else. What looked like a high risk Christmas Day launch was smooth as cream. iPlayer was being talked about everywhere, and everywhere was being praised. The blue eyed boy had returned...

In all this, however, the thing that brought home the transformation most powerfully was sitting on a bus one night in London with my wife. Behind us were two Russians in enthusiastic conversation in their native language. In mid sentence came the English words "BBC iPlayer". I think they liked it.

Ian Hunter is Managing Editor, Internet Group, BBC Future Media and Technology.

The new site draws on the wealth of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) and other information that exists across bbc.co.uk and tries to guide people more effectively towards the area most likely to actually help them. Sections include accessibility, radio, BBC iPlayer and mobile. I think we've made it look a lot nicer, too.

This launch is part of a bigger project looking at how we can improve the way that we interact with our audience. Currently we get over 40,000 emails a month from users, and those are just the ones that we can count because they come through the "official" central route. There are many other routes which we don't record.

Because of the way the website evolved - bit by bit, with lots of small teams working on specific parts of the website - there are now over a hundred different routes on bbc.co.uk for sending feedback. This means that the way we deal with feedback can be inconsistent and, in the worst case, a "contact us" button can be left open when the programme team has moved on.

This has led to some understandable grumbling and the BBC Trust has asked us to improve things. Ray Snoddy recently tackled me on this on Newswatch, too.

Part of the solution is for us to agree some common standards for how feedback should be handled. We're writing some advice for teams at the moment, and will be publishing these as part of the New Media Guidelines later this year, so that our users know will know what to expect, too.

Another part of the solution is to improve the information that we provide on bbc.co.uk and make it easier to find. A huge proportion of those 40,000 emails (not to mention the ones that never get reported centrally) ask questions about our programmes or services. And the money we spend answering them comes out of the budget we have to spend on the programmes and services themselves. Feedback is valued and responding to it is an important part of the service we provide, but we do want to make is easier for people to find things for themselves. If we can provide better information on bbc.co.uk (through sites such as BBC Programmes), and help users to find it (through searchable and rateable FAQs like those on the BBC iPlayer help pages), more people will be able to answer their own questions without having to send us an email.

The new Help site is another step on this journey. Any feedback is welcome!

Ian Hunter is Managing Editor, Internet, BBC Future Media and Technology